Is Jack Dorsey resurrecting Vine?

For those who were around during the early days of the Internet and social media, you probably remember Vine. The short-form video content platform had a brief heyday before it was purchased and eventually shuttered by Twitter (now X). But Twitter’s co-founder Jack Dorsey is bringing it back.

His nonprofit “and Other Stuff” has dug through the archives and been able to recover about 100,000 old Vine videos. These are being made available on a new app called diVine, hosted on open source protocol Nostr. A beta test of the new app launched recently and is already out of slots for new users. Fortunately there is also a web version if you missed out.

Evan Henshaw-Plath, a former Twitter employee who goes by Rabble, is the diVine project leader. Rabble said the idea behind resurrecting Vine was to do something fun and nostalgic, while keeping it open source. “Can we do something that takes us back, that lets us see those old things, but also lets us see an era of social media where you could either have control of your algorithms, or you could choose who you follow, and it’s just your feed, and where you know that it’s a real person that recorded the video?” Rabble said.